Ecommerce Forum

A would-be customer entered an obscene and insulting email address in the form when ordering. Sometimes customers enter funny non-working email addys, but never one so insulting and nasty. I got so mad that I called him up and told him I would not fill his order and that I felt exactly the same way about him, only I used the words he used, and hung up on him. I have never sworn at a customer before. I voided the transaction and banned his ip address with Authorize.net. Yep, I was real mad.

He called and left a message claiming his "friend" had come up with this email addy and that he wanted to place the order. He called back again later, and then called the next day wanting to get a catalog (must have been prevented from ordering by the ip address ban). I always recognized his caller id so didn't talk to him. Don't want his business.

I am just wondering if others have had customers do things like this and if so how did you react? Just cancel the order? Ignore it? I know I over-reacted, but what should I have done?

I think it's hilarious that this guy tried to be a wiseguy and you called his behaviour! Bet he was shocked to the core!

Personally I agree that you should have billed him for his behaviour:

Item = $X.00 Dealing with your attitude problem $1000.00

Either ways, it's your business, if you're happy with losing the dollars and keeping your integrity, then do that and good on you.

Personally, I'd probably serve him as you know he doesn't know you and it can't possibly have been personal. I'm happy with taking his money and knowing his attitude will take him straight to where he deserves to be!

Miop - I thought Hipcrime was reasonable compared to this guy. His first name was Gary, last name will remain unmentioned. He had his own server and allowed a small number of people to post out of it. Ring a bell? I actually liked some of the Meowers who had accounts with him. I just didn't like him or his wife.

Reading through a sites privacy or email policies is the equivilant of standing in line at a retail store.

A site forcing me to give them my personal email address just to buy a product is as bad as Radio Shack needing my phone number so I can buy some batteries.

Online shopping should equal convenience and quick service. Adding hoops for customers to jump through to simply get a product is very, very annoying.

The following is a true story,

My local grocery store, Safeway, jacked up all their prices a few years ago and then introduced a club card that you had to use in order to get regular prices. You don't actually have to have the card with you, you can simply punch in a telephone number. I went through the local phone book and found a list of very hard to pronounce names and their phone numbers. I went to the store and kept trying phone numbers until one worked. When they hand you your reciept they are supposed to thank you by your last name. They can't pronounce the name and some try to hold back the laughter when they read it since I am obviously not a foreigner with a name with four h's in it. One actually asked me how to pronounce it, I told her I had no idea how to pronounce my own name.

Forcing people to do things that serve them no purpose could be considered offensive.

Personally. I think you can do what the hell you like.. it's your business..

Business is all about cash flow.. I get that .. but it is also about time spent, investment, ROI etc .. and balancing all these things up.. so to say take the money as that is all that is important is IMO just bad business...

In a company you have to also invest in people, nurture your reputation and spare a thought for the environment .. people who believe that all is money are in fact deluding themselves...

So if you got a deal of self satisfaction at telling this guy where to get off, I think you got your moneys worth anyway :-)

>>Personally, I'd probably serve him as you know he doesn't know you and it can't possibly have been personal. I'm happy with taking his money and knowing his attitude will take him straight to where he deserves to be!

>>Show me the money...

Exactly the way I feel. Why would I care about what people type about me hundreds of miles away, or the way they smell, or how long their hair is.... yada yada.

My bank does not ask who I got my money from, or if they had proper manners when I pay the mortgage.

>>>then introduced a club card that you had to use in order to get regular prices.

Its a way for the grocery stores to develop huge databases full of detailed marketing information so they can target particular customers with on target marketing.

I knew of this group of people who all had these clubs cards. Every month they would swap around the cards, and then use them for day to day shopping. The whole point was to make the data they collected USELESS! Because, now you have young single guys buying tampons, and young single women whose diet consisted of beef jerky and cheap beer.

Someone is searching the internet for a product. Comes across your site. The product is unique because otherwise he would probably just get it from a big name store. He goes through the ordering process and everything is going along smoothly. Then he comes across the email part. It tells him that he can't order the product without giving this company his valid email address. He thinks, oh great, now i'll be getting their newsletter cluttering up my inbox for the next ten years. The last thing I need is more spam that I can't unsubscribe from.

Sure he could go waste 10 more minutes reading your privacy policy to see whether or not your going to sell his email address if or when you sell your business down the road, but he's not interested in reading another lengthy policy. He simply wants the product. Isn't that enough. Here he is, happilly willing to give you his hard earned cash for your product, but thats not enough, you want his email address also. He finds this very annoying. He's thinking, "why do I have to fork over personal information to buy this product, my cash isn't good enough?"

So he decides he will give a fake email address, but wait, what if you send personal information to the email address, like his credit card #, home address or phone number. He wouldn't want some stranger to get his personal information. He knows that most email companies don't allow you to use profanity in your email address. Since an address with profanity in it would most likely be a "null" address, that means their would be no chance of someone accidently getting this email. Se he fills in a fake email address and uses profanity to ensure that the email doesn't end up in the wrong hands.

And others of us care about things like civility, common decency and respect. Each to their own!

I had a potential client who used noneofyourbusiness@gof***yourself.com as his e:mail address. On the inquiry form, he wrote some thing to the effect of ... if you want my business call me."

When I didn't call, because I clearly didn't want his business, he called me and was incensed that I hadn't called him. I explained that I found his e:mail address exceptionally rude and that I didn't want nor need his business. He proceeded to go on several travel forums and bad mouth my company ... dropping my URL all over the place! :)

I received three inquiries (and subsequent sales) as a direct result of his tirade! And I still refused to sell to him even when he came back a second and a third time offering no apology for his rudeness.

Nobody needs to take abuse from a client for any reason. I do however think you were very wrong to call him and return the abuse. Just ignore those types and let them find someone else who only cares about being paid.

I like to build a relationship with my customers, many of whom come back several times, year after year. I don't want or need customers like that. Its my choice and yours.

Unfortunately, curse words are now very common. In many western cultures you hear them all day long (like I need to tell you this), particularily if you are young. Young people are also the heaviest internet users. So if you have sensitive ears/eyes, and take cursing personally, you are going to be increasingly insulted as time goes on.

I am not saying its right, I am just saying you might as well get used to it.

So if they have a email server, then this could be a perfectly valid email address.

Proving my point exactly, the more rude and obscure the language is, the less chance of someone having it. The original poster said that the name wasn't just normal cuss words but the person actually went way out of line and posted something super nasty. He was simply covering his butt, unlike the "noneofyourbusiness" guy.

We had a customer with a filthy email address. He bought several times and emails to him didn't bounce.

Do you ever look up customers in Google? Had one who ran porn sites. I refused to ship and he replied that we just lost a perfectly good sale. Probably so.

Had another who was listed on a Beanie Baby site for having sold counterfeit Beanies (this was around '98, needless to say). His email was something like "cuddlybeanies@xyz." How cute and innocent...yet a crook!

All I'm saying is its a matter of choice. Nobody has to do business with rude or abusive customers. If the potential customer I mentioned didn't know that at least "some" people might take offense at his e:mail address, then he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Get used to it? No, I don't think I will, thanks!

If money meant everything ... perhaps, but it doesn't! Job satisfation has a lot to do with my business and when you work 7 days a week, it just doesn't make sense (to me) to have to put up with garbage like that.

I'll just keep dealing with my nice, polite customers and my competitors are welcome to the rude ones. That's just peachey with me. ;)

Liane, I think you were right to ditch that customer and that there's more to it than use of an expletive. Your example wasn't someone who simply had an email address with a naughty word or phrase in it. This is someone who wanted to start out a business relationship with a hostile attitude. And it sounds like HRoth's experience was pretty similar.

It's one thing to hear from customer contacting me because they're upset with their buying experience. But it's quite another to deal with someone who is antagonistic from the start. Why welcome that kind of trouble?

I use curse words, so it's not that I am so easily offended by curse words as such. But I don't start off talking to people that way. I don't use the f word as a way to address the cashier at the grocery store. It's not appropriate. If I did, they would have a perfect right to kick me out of the store. Which is just what I did with him.

Consider yourself one of the few lucky people on the planet earth who have the ability turn down money because of their morals.

I know what it means to be hungry. I've been there ... and it wan't all that long ago either. But I didn't prostutute myself or do anything which went against my code of ethics to make money even when I didn't have a place to live or more than a few cents in my pocket.

I consider business as well as moral ethics to be very important in this life. We all have the choice to turn down money if it goes against the grain. The test is in whether or not we have the guts to do it when it would be so easy to sell out. I refuse to let someone buy my ethics at any price. But that's just me and I'm happy that way. As I said before ... each to their own! :)

Consider yourself one of the few lucky people on the planet earth who have the ability turn down money because of their morals.

Let me see if I understand.

So the ability to decline to sell a good or service is something most people cannot do, as they need money too badly. That's the gist of that post.

Does that then mean that a person shouldn't decline to sell the good or service if it compromises her morals or ethics, or that she should decline, but her circumstances just most likely wouldn't allow it?

If Twist is saying that she should not decline to sell, then that's just patently false. By that reasoning, it would be OK to kidnap or murder for money. Clearly, that's not the case.

Just because much of the world is in desperate poverty doesn't mean that it's moral or ethical for a person to do anything for money. Tell me if this is not true.

If Twist is saying that she should not decline to sell, then that's just patently false. By that reasoning, it would be OK to kidnap or murder for money. Clearly, that's not the case.

She didn't decline the sale because the buyer supported terrorism. She declined the sale because someone offended her. They didn't offend her to her face and they don't even know her, so it wasn't personal either. Maybe i'm just jealous because I have never had the ability to turn down money because someone I don't know, who doesn't know me, and I have never met hurt my feelings.

I hope I'm not making a mountain out of a molehill (and I trust people to let me know if that's the case). I agree that this is true...

She didn't decline the sale because the buyer supported terrorism. She declined the sale because someone offended her. They didn't offend her to her face and they don't even know her, so it wasn't personal either.

...But with all due respect, that issue wasn't addressed in msg #51.

That having been said, it sounds as though you agree that even though much of the world is in extreme poverty --as you pointed out in your post-- having a moral or ethical limit to what you're willing to do for money is an intrinsic right, not just a luxury for the privileged few.

I don't see the logic in saying that because there is so much poverty in the world that we cannot turn down a customer. Do you go out to restaurants to eat? Do you own a car? Do you use plastic in any form? All of those things are extraordinarily wasteful.

We just received an order with a nasty, and incredibly unprofessional, email address. The really odd part about it was that we noticed the order appeared to be placed from a workplace - insurance company, no less. As it wasn't directly insulting against us, we might have considered accepting it - except that there turned out to be many other red flags when we looked into it further.

If it had been offensive and insulting, we wouldn't have accepted the order request. It's not like it's a matter of "turning down" money that's being thrown at us. We work in return for the money we take and think it's more than reasonable to choose not to spend our time and energy on people who go out of their way to be offensive. In our experience, such people almost always cost much more in time, money and/or business reputation in the long run.